Suffer Well
by Victoria Squalor
Summary: Aurora comes to her captive in the night with a dagger and a question. (Written as therapy for "Into the Deep")


**A/N:** Oy. Much needed therapy after "Into The Deep". This came to me somewhere between sleeping and waking and I had to shape it into something before I journey back into the land of AU Denial.  
**disclaimer:** OUAT is definitely not mine; if it were, Hook would not be pulling that shit with my princess.

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_Please don't speak; you'll only lie._  
-DM

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**Suffer Well**

by Victoria Squalor

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They'd unanimously agreed to let Aurora decide what was to be done with their captive. "Put him in chains," she'd said softly, looking him dead in the eye for only a moment before turning away.

Mulan had been the one to do it—rather ungraciously, he thought, for a warrior of such purported virtue; she'd planted her foot in the small of his back and pushed him hard to the ground before shackling his wrists behind his back, allowing him so little slack in the chains that his right arm was set at a permanently cramped angle. When he'd asked, only somewhat jokingly, how he was supposed to relieve himself if the urge arrived, she'd fixed him with one humorless dark eye and shrugged. "Maybe we'll just let you make a mess of yourself."

She'd unfastened his hook too, but she hadn't taken it with her. She'd hung it on a rusty nail protruding from the side of the barn wall, just out of reach from what his ankle chains would allow. He managed a grudging smile at that.

The barn they'd chosen as his holding cell was dilapidated and drafty, with scraps of hay littering the floor, the air still somehow rank with the leavings of animals no longer housed here. _Only the one, now, _he thought as he tried to contort himself into a marginally more comfortable position.

He'd fallen asleep, somehow, with his head wedged onto his shoulder, when he was awoken by the sound of footsteps on the creaking floorboards. Light, delicate footsteps. He unstuck one bleary eye and peered into the darkness as a beam of unnatural light struck him in the face, causing him to squint and recoil.

"Your Highness," he croaked, voice thick from his pitiful sleep. "I'd bow, to be sure, were I not locked in this position."

Silence. Only the soft rustle of feathers and silk.

He tried again. "Perhaps you could, ah, turn off your torch, so I might be able to look upon your lovely face? It's a bit bright."

The beam of light shifted several inches to the right, sliding just off his eyes. "There," she said quietly. "Are you more comfortable now?"

The weight of her voice settled on his chest like a boulder. He squinted through the gloom, now diluted with weak artificial light. Just enough for him to make out the hard line of her soft mouth, the barely perceptible glitter in her eyes.

"Have you come to ask why I did it?" he asked, feeling suddenly tired and annoyed with both her and himself and everything else—with captivity, with the quest that had led him to this feculent little town, with the whole damned charade.

"I know why you did it." Her voice had a lovely patrician lilt to it, a way of tripping over syllables that marked a diction carefully groomed by royal governesses. But it dripped ice.

"Then have you come to release me?" he asked, infusing the question with all the cynical lightness he could muster.

Aurora chortled, a single bitter note. "And if I did? What should I do with you then, Captain?"

"You could keep me." He watched her closely for any shift in that fine-boned face. "I could be your court jester. Or your bedwarmer. You'd enjoy me, Highness. Even trussed up like this, I can be quite creative with the other parts of my body."

A soft, derisive huff of breath. "How sad, Killian, that that remains all you have left to bargain with."

His name on her lips gave him pause, made him wonder. Why was he _Killian_ now, and not Hook? Well, perhaps since the hook was dangling from the wall, taunting him from behind her shoulder.

Killian sighed. "Well, if you're not here to interrogate me, or free me, then by process of elimination…you must be here to kill me." Not that he entirely believed that. It was hard to imagine those smooth pale hands slippery with blood, those elegant fingers plunging steel into his flesh. It was so at odds with her frail, delicate exterior.

But he'd misjudged her once before, and was already paying the price for it.

She shifted slightly, still keeping the torchlight trained on him while slowly withdrawing her other arm from the folds of her heavy silk cloak. Even in the scattered light, the blade glinted with the turn of her wrist. He swallowed hard.

Aurora knelt on the floor beside him, setting the torch on its end, and brushed her fingers through his hair, which was starting to mat with sweat and dirt. A soft touch, a lover's caress. A sharp contrast to the blade now pressing into the underside of his neck, the steel scraping slightly against his Adam's apple. He fought to keep his tremors under control.

"You'll stain that pretty dress of yours." His voice wobbled, and he hated himself for it.

"It's already ruined."

The look in her eyes stumped him. Calm, serene, yet mournful. As if she were grieving his death before she'd even given it to him.

"What are you waiting for, then?" he rasped, the pressure of the blade making it harder to speak. "I'm at your mercy. Take it. Take your revenge." He could feel the hot tears welling at the corners of his eyes, his face burning with shame, with the desire for her to slit his throat already and end his humiliation. Even if she nicked the wrong spot, a slow, torturous bleeding out would still be preferable to this unbearable pretense. _What is she _waiting_ for? _ "Damn it, Aurora!" This came out in a pathetic wheeze.

The blade eased slightly, and a low sob escaped her lips. Through the haze of his own tears he could still make out a droplet sliding down her cheek.

"What did you _feel?" _she whispered. "I need to know."

He blinked uncomprehendingly at her. "What did I feel when—"

"When you _took it._" Her voice shattered like crystal. "Did you feel _anything?"_

Killian stared up at the princess, her fine features crumpled in anguish. What _had _he felt? He'd knelt over the sleeping girl, being careful not to disturb her, reaching almost tenderly into her chest to pull out her glowing heart, the very essence of her life. A thing just as fragile as the body that housed it, and he'd just chucked it inside his satchel like a piece of fruit.

Truthfully, he hadn't allowed himself to feel much of anything, other than furious with Cora, her casual dismissal, and especially, _especially _Emma Swan and the damned fool she'd made of him. Which made it easier for him to shift his rage to Emma's companion—the feeble princess laying helpless before him like a banquet waiting to be sampled. The one who'd been so willing and eager to believe in his honesty, when he'd been lying through his teeth. _What a perfect unwitting little helper she would be_—and had been. Until it had all gone to hell, and the hunter had been captured by the game.

And now that delicate little doe was going to kill him.

Aurora shook her head at his silence, the effort spilling more tears down her face. "You held it in your hand, and you thought nothing of it at all, is that it?"

"It…" His mouth was so dry he had to swallow before he could continue. "It…it wasn't _personal, _Princess—"

Her other hand rose up and landed a stinging blow on his cheek. He grimaced, his eyes wrenching shut, though that was more to avoid having to look at her.

"Of course it was," she whispered. "It was _mine."_

She might well have twisted the dagger into his guts. Yet it remained at his throat, wobbling from her unsteady hand, the cold steel warmed now by how long it had been flush with his flesh. "So take mine, then," he gasped. "Take it, and do as you please. It's yours. A heart for a heart. That's only fair, isn't it?"

Aurora stared back at him and sniffled, her eyes dark and round and more doe-like than ever. Slowly, she drew the dagger from his throat down to his chest, slicing off the fastenings on his shirt and carefully pushing the cloth back. She poked at the exposed triangle of skin matted with dark hair, the tip of the blade stopping right over his nipple.

"I can't," she said, her voice too soft to bear. "There's nothing in there."

Killian's eyes darted between her and the dagger as she raised it again, but this time it only tore through his sleeve to expose the tattoo underneath. The blade point traced the outline of the heart, then underneath the letters that spelled out Milah's name. A thin line of blood welled up along the hilt of the other dagger, the one inked on his flesh, as she pressed it deeper into his arm.

"You lost yours a long time ago. So long ago, that I don't think you remember what it's like to have one."

He could say nothing to that.

They both watched as a scarlet trickle rolled away from the cut and disappeared into the ragged remnants of his sleeve. Aurora pulled the dagger away, sheathing it somewhere within the voluminous folds of her cloak, then quite abruptly pulled herself to her feet. Killian was stunned.

"So what are you going to do now?" he couldn't help but ask, once he'd found his voice again. She paused and turned back to him, one hand on the barn door.

"With you?" Her voice was airy and innocent now, her tears completely forgotten. She considered it a moment. "I don't know, Killian. I may have to forgive you."

And she left, taking the only light with her.


End file.
